The Donald Trump Show

The Donald Trump National Convention in Cleveland .. wasn’t really much for storytelling. Its messages were muddled, its shared agenda boiled down to hating Hillary Clinton, many of its speakers didn’t want to talk about the candidate and one declined even to endorse him.

.. First, it was a showcase for the institutional failure of the Republican Party in the face of Trump’s assault.

.. Almost none of these figures made a positive case for Trumpism

.. Trump’s campaign actually seemed to hype — by apparently whipping boos against Cruz from the floor, and by having Trump show up in the hall as the speech wrapped, as though the two men might stage a W.W.E. confrontation.

.. the greatest danger of a Trump presidency might not be his transparently authoritarian tendencies, but rather the global chaos that a winging-it Great Man in the Oval Office could unleash.

..free of policy beyond the promise of quick fixes and delivered with a strongman’s permanent shout — while also pulsing with an ideological message whose power will outlive Trump’s wild campaign.
..That message was a long attack, not on liberalism per se, but on the bipartisan post-Cold War elite consensus on foreign policy, mass immigration, free trade.

 

Ted Cruz Might Be the Only Republican Who Understands Donald Trump

If that wasn’t clear before the lights went up in the Quicken Loans Arena on Monday, it certainly was by the time Trump made his from-the-shadows entrance that night. Within minutes, you could find photos of the scene paired with shots of “the Undertaker” entering a crazed arena that made overt what we already suspected: that this week’s festivities were going to be as much W.W.E. as R.N.C.

.. And that’s what I like about what Cruz did last night: He embraced the professional-wrestling ethic that Trump has so fully imposed on this campaign. He leaned full-on into the spectacle.

.. But Cruz played the arena, as Triple-H or the Donald would. He understood that Trump doesn’t just want his former opponents to endorse him — he expects them to submit to him. This nominee does not consider it his job to reach out and favor his vanquished opponents with magnanimity and grace. His willingness to humiliate the likes of Christie, mocking his weight (“No more Oreos”), among other things, should make that obvious.